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Welcome all to the 95th round of the Dakka Painting challenge. For the unfamiliar, this is a friendly painting competition open to members of all skill levels and experience, whether your entry is your first or you thousand-and-first time painting miniatures. Each month, finished entries are collected into a thread where the community can vote on their favorite pieces, and those votes go towards an annual overall League that runs for 12 rounds.

This month, the theme is Ascension: Whether through holy gifts, technological augmentation or evolution, some warriors reach a state of rank above their fellows and gain the prowess to match. Your entry should include models that have undergone such an changes on their rise to power, be that a perfectly-evolved monstrosity, a dark wizard reaching lichdom or agrizzled veteran ridelled with cybernetics. (of course, this theme can have a few different meanings, so as ever these are only guidelines and painying, say, a flying model as a more literal interpretation is fine!)

How To Enter

- You may enter up to 5 MODELS as a SINGLE ENTRY, and are permitted one entry per member per month. If you enter multiple models, they should ideally be related in some way, such as part of the same squad, unit or scene if you are doing a diorama
- You MUST post a 'proof' picture of your entry in the thread of the state it was in before you started working on it; this must be either unassembled, unpainted, primed or coated a single colour. Entries that do not submit a valid Proof Picture will not be eligible for voting.
- After this, you may post WIP pictures in this thread and your own if you wish, and on completing the entry, you may post up to 6 final pictures IN THIS THREAD that will then be used for voting. Please note that pictures in a montage or collage picture will be considered individual images for this purpose, so while these types of presentation are certainly acceptable, please keep the image limit in mind when compiling them. For example, a collage of 5 images and one separate image would count as your 6 picture allowance.


So What Do I Win?
- Points... and points mean... bragging rights for the next month! Following the vote, points will be awarded to every entrant. This year, the Points you receive will be equal to the Percentage of Votes your entry receives in the final Voting thread; if you get 10%, you get 10 points, if you get 6% you get 6 points, so on and so forth.

These points will be used to form a league table, which will be updated month on month as the results come in.


How Long Do I Have?
This challenge begins 1st of January and will end at midnight GMT on 31st January. After this, I shall compile the finished entries into a new thread, and voting will run for 5 days.

List of Entrants:


Daia T'Nara: Slaaneshi Seraphim (NSFW)


inmygravenimage: Storm Lions Captain


JoshInJapan: Anti-Paladin


Vejut: Beaver Deacon



Leopold Helveine: Squig Drone



[quote=KidCthulhu: Asphodel the Pale


theCrowe: WW2 Aviation


Tallandra: Suppressor Squad


Geifer: Missionary


Captain Brown: Cherub Scribe


Nevelon: Ultramarine Ancient


Boringstuff: Iron Warriors Space Marine


Flinty: The Ascension.


Gulgog TufToof : Ork Nob


Lovejoy: Blue Dragon


Maharg: Captain America


urbanevil: Mortarion


Pariah Press: Servitor


ZergSmasher : Master Lazarus


Jadenim: gargoyle!


Mr Nobody: Chaos Spawn.


Graphite:Clan Ghost Bear Heavy Omnimech Star


Midget Gems: Ork Angels

I'm thinking I'll do this Rogue Trader Dreadnought... provided I can polish it up enough to look good! I'd planned to paint him a few years back, when I was still using white undercoat. So he's white, which I don't like to do these days... we'll see how it goes!

I may do a bit of putty work on him too - there's some pretty rough bits of casting in places.



cheers,
Michael

First you ascend to a post-human space marine
Then you ascend the ranks veterancy
Then you die a hero, and ascend to the Emperor’s side.

But it doesn’t stop there!

Your remains ascend to the top of a banner pole and become relics!



The ancient holding the banner is somewhere earlier on the same path.

I bought this 3-stage anti-paladin new way back in the late 1980's. I painted and based them to fit my Warriors if Chaos army (I counted anything smaller than official Citadel models as Marauders rather that full warriors,). I like to think my skills have improved over the years, so this entry will hopefully show my own ascension as well as that of this evil fellow.

For this theme I don’t really have anything in the vein of a particularly super-evolved-enhanced-mega-warrior on the cusp of godhood. But maybe these will be close enough.


The Supermarine Spitfire was pretty top notch to begin with in its time but these two have both been further modified to provide enhanced performance in their particular roles. One with extended wings for higher altitude interceptions and one with clipped wings for the lower altitude ground attack role.

Oh @theCrowe that's such a cool interpretation!!
Here's mine, for now at least

Gonna hit the ground running in 2023 with my entry for this challenge: Master Lazarus of the Dark Angels 5th Company. Proof pic:

He has ascended in various ways, including his promotion to Master of the 5th Company after the death of his predecessor, Master Balthazar (the guy from the old Dark Vengeance set), and then his induction into the Inner Circle, and finally his crossing of the Rubicon Primaris (becoming the first Primaris member of the Inner Circle).

"Riddled with cybernetics," you say? I think this servitor qualifies.

"Orks love to fight. The bigger, louder and more anarchic the battle, the more Orks enjoy it. They will brawl amongst one another if they cannot find any external party against whom to vent their aggression, and in doing so they establish a simple and robust pecking order: the biggest, strongest, and most ferociously violent Ork inevitably fights their way to the top of the heap... Moreover, the more orks fight and win, the larger and more monstrous they grow..."
I'm in this month with an ork nob. In a way, the model itself is in ascension too, as this was a GW free model of the month from last year that was hastily assembled with no care for removal of mold lines and big chunks of sprue still hanging off of him. He is ascending to a fully-painted spot as head of a squad in my Waaagh!.

I had been wondering about naming this thing... The Ascension it is

Oooh corellian? Nice

It’s not technically Corellian, as it is from a Kickstarter I got from this site

https://imperialterrain.com/collections/stls-for-star-wars-legion-terrain/products/hunters-ship-digital-stl-files

They do some great not-quite-star wars and match the design aesthetic well while being their own thing. It does rather scream chibi YT 2000 though

Descision time. Bigger lettters closer together or smaller letters but more space between?

 Flinty wrote:
Descision time. Bigger lettters closer together or smaller letters but more space between?

Bigger/closer looks better IMHO.

One more vote for bigger and closer together.

Also:

Cool people write that in aurebesh so nobody actually knows what it's saying.

Yeah, definitely bigger/closer

Cool. I was leaning marginally that way already. Thank you internet for speaking

I’m having trouble deciding between 2 different duos of models for this month, so I’ll just post proofs for both of them and post the final images of whichever one I get done/think looks better. The Corpuscarii have ascended through the ranks of the AdMech and have been blessed by the Motive Force and the Plague Marines have been blessed with gifts from Grandfather Nurgle.

Took a little while to get going - nothing I had on the table already was really saying 'ascension' to me so I needed a trip to the shop, plus Christmas was Lego time so I had to find somewhere to put all that to free up the painting area for work - but I think I'll go with Sister Angelica of the Order of I Still Haven't Thought Up A Name (I swear I had something the other day, should've written it down).

I finished converting my entry:

Ana Quina of the Lower Basins, Imperial Missionary.

She needed a few bionic replacements after going up against the heretic Archdeacon of the Cult of Superior Elevation.

On to painting, then!

Here are the first two stages of the anti-paladin side-by-side:


More photos here I see a lot of places that need touchups, and I need to spruce up their bases as well, but for now I'm going to set them aside and start on the third stage.

I feel incredibly disheartened that I offered Ascension as a category and now I can't find anything to enter

 KidCthulhu wrote:
I feel incredibly disheartened that I offered Ascension as a category and now I can't find anything to enter

Still two thirds of the month left to come up with something.

Huh, this looks like a nice way to break the routine, maybe I'll prep a unit for this.
I'll have a look around if I still have something laying around I can " exalt" to join this fun challenge.

Quick WIP shot before I hit the sack tonight:

He's getting there, still a bit more to be done. Been a pretty enjoyable model to work on thus far.

Sister Angelica, Slaaneshi Seraphim (spoilers because, as usual - look I don't keep doing this to be weird, it's just how Slaanesh is - boobies):



Still haven't settled on a name for the Order that forms the fallen Sororitas contingent of the Bringers of Wonder, it'll be Order of the something something where one is Biblical-sounding and the other's a synonym for bangin', I just need to stop changing my mind. So as shown in the proof pic I had this Scourge/Seraphim/Daemonette combo done, and I was thinking, do I really want to risk ruining a pretty decent looking conversion by crappily sculpting a pregnancy onto her? but considering the consequences isn't something chaos is big on, so I figured why not, if I didn't do it with this mini I'd just have to do it with another one later. Wound up having to slather the flesh tone on pretty heavily to try to hide the rough texture because, like I said, I'm not good at this, but never mind - same reason I wound up putting that tattoo on her (I looked it up in the chaos runes dictionary in The Lost and the Damned, it means 'crossbred with steed', which... look she's made some questionable life choices, nobody's denying that). Fun story, that shoulder pad on the base is from a plastic Berzerker I got during 3rd edition - are they really still selling the same kit? (I mean it's not a bad kit, I guess) - who I traded with a friend to get so I could convert him to be down on the ground cowering, and put him in front of my Archon on the shelf. So he's been rescued from whatever she was going to do to him, but he's obviously lost an arm to this gal, and the rest of him's being crushed under the foot of an Obliterator I've been slowly painting for a couple of months now, so the poor guy just can't catch a break.

Edited (twice, now) because the earlier photos seemed a bit dark - ever since I got nice bright lights for my painting corner the camera's decided it doesn't need its flash after all, so I've had to abandon 'I don't know, let the camera figure it out' mode and start adjusting settings for myself. Also I've maybe settled on 'Order of the Honeyed Abyss', unless I change my mind again later.

Very cool kitbashing there!

So I have stuck to my guns and spent this week working on my Mounted Storm Lions Captain: Captain Tonitruum, first among the Ascended -

Both he and his mount have "ascended" from AoS to 40k

Had a lot of fun with the conversion, basing and paint scheme.

I do love how the Calibanite Lion turned out though, especially its 40k mods.

Poor little Deathwing

Ok so I pretyped this post at home because I was bored and didn't feel like playing diablo 2 yet(yeah very retro I know) so had some spare time to git som storyz to da projekd.

My ascension challenge entry is going to be the pinnacle of Orkish engineering.
Orks have seen those pesky Tau drones aplenty, even in Killteams these days.. *zoggin cheadas*
So the best Mechs of Orky klergs came together and weirdboystormed the options at hand.

The smartest of the Mechs came forward and raised his middle finger to signify that he had something to say (he learned that from oomies who went to school, unlike him.. which is why he was smarter)

This was practically equal to the atmosphere at the council of Nicea so bear arms with me, or just bear with me (forgot which)
Anyway, Mechboz Gukka'a Ackgug. (translation: creator good-alarm) rushed forward, punched the smartest mech in the jaw outright killing him dead, was jailed for a day, found in his cell reading an orkish book dressed like a scientist and was reinstated to express his ideas because this was considered a mojo. ..or well.. miracle/magic of sorts.

No magic was used, nor any animals harmed in this event. (yet) (one ork was harmed though)

So, Mechboz Gukka'a Ackgug, dumb as a brick.. explained that his idea of the pinnacle of tech was to be a Squig, rebuilt like a Tau drone, and remote controlled by a nearby Mech (in this case himself) to ensure the Squig was aiming right because Orks have no clue how to build AI.
So the project to create the ascended tech of '5QU1907R0N 91210' was commenced.

The process took long, about two days.. because Eemguk Nubuu (translation: my-stuff not yours) stole 500 bolts and screws from the workplace and placed them all around the Ork-village hoping that they would grow bolts and screwtree's (they didn't) and therefor an extra day was lost to find all the aforementioned and place them back into the senseo machine they were taken from (had nothing to do with the work on the Drone tbh)
Eventually, the Drone was finished and welded underneath an unwilling (very) Squig called "Squig" who screamed a dreadful sound the entire time as this was going on, this screaming is still on the minds of those who attended as phantom screams to this day.

This wasn't because of the welding but because he had a psychiatric disorder that made him scream day and night so he was not very useful for stealthy missions and we're talking Blood axes here. (yeah, that's the klan I roll with people..)

When Gukka'a Ackgug came to inspect (he wasn't attending most of the project because he was busy drinking some senseo, its pretty good.. but you shouldn't drink senseo all year imho, usually during the summer is the best time and then get off cafeine again cause it kindof riles you up and turns you into a restless crazy person.) he was pretty satisfied, so he bought a Nintendo switch controller and connected it to the Squigdrone to test how well it would fly.

Safe to say noone in the workplace survived that day, except for Gukka'a Ackgug. (And the squig.. I think atleast.. ..otherwise Ackgug is flying around a drone with a squigcorpse welded into it.. which is still kindof awesome.)
This is how the ascension of Ork technology came to be.

Here's some pics of the kitbashing process (also proving I'm the one building this slowed thing) and hope that this post alone already gives me the #2nd placement on the ranking.


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-

-


If not, I'll try to paint this properly. (will be hard.. I'm bad at painting assembled units)

(I think I'm actually settled on painting the squig as a dead squig because it sounded cool in the contemplation..)

I'll try to put some exhaust-fumes below the Drone thing, its still Orkish tech ofcourse.. nothing plasma driven. And add some antennas and wiring ofcourse.. Also will have to drill a hole into the Squig's behind to place it on the airbourn-pin.

Wish me luck.
-Leopold Helveine.

Progress on my ascending spits.

The eagle-eyed amongst you might spot a hurricane among them. (Camouflaged amidst the painting rag) No surprise but I’m painting a veritable airforce of interesting subjects at the same time as these two. I do love how painting any particular aircraft will open up a new rabbit hole of fascinating historical aviation.

There is one more that fits the particular theme of better, faster, ascending to glorious heights of superlative greatness. It’ll be a Hawker Tempest V if I get the other two done in time. One of the only planes of its era fast enough to intercept a V-1.

He may not have succeeded (yet), but the HeroQuest necromancer is definitely trying to ascend!



And the Gargoyle has ascended from a statue to a living construct (and can also fly?!)